Today, advertising on the Web currently consists of two broad classes: display ads and text ads. Display ads typically have graphic designs and occupy a fixed area of a web page. A common form of display ads are “banner ads” which typically are displayed at the top of a web page. Text ads, which usually have a fixed and minimal graphic design, and are generally laid out in groups.
One difficulty with display ads is a “real estate” problem associated with them. There can sometimes be a tension between the amount of information that an advertiser wants to communicate and the available space (in pixels) on the web page. Pixels can be a finite resource, and the owners of web sites tend to not give too many pixels of a web page to an advertiser in order to prevent degrading an experience the owners are offering. Closely related to this tension is a “click-barrier” problem. The click barrier problem can arise when a viewer is interested in a product/service being advertised but is hesitant to click on the display ad because of the annoyance of being transition to an entire new web page. Such a web page transition can sometimes lead to the user losing their context of the initial web page.